Culture » January 1, 2015

Slacking Workers of the World Unite

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It turns out that slacking requires 'planning, collaboration, risk calculation and ethical consideration.'

Seventy percent of porn viewing and 60 percent of online shopping take place during business hours. Studies indicate that worldwide, the average employee spends about 1 to 3 hours a day goofing off at work.

In Empty Labor: Idleness and Workplace Resistance, Roland Paulsen, a scholar of business administration at Lund University in Sweden, sets out to understand what he calls empty labor, which includes anything a worker does on the clock that isn’t work—be it surfing the web, sleeping, organizing the office football pool, or writing a doctoral dissertation on the sly.

Paulsen focused on the most extreme shirkers. He interviewed 43 Swedish workers who claimed to spend less than half of their work hours actually working. He tracked down these hardcore non-performers through friends of friends, web ads and the Swedish website maska.nu, where people share slacking stories and tips. Most were white-collar workers, but a construction worker, a security guard and several house cleaners also participated. Paulsen's interviews were designed to answer two basic questions: How do you get away with this? and Why do you do it?

It turns out that slacking off is serious business: “ ‘Doing nothing’ while at work can be a very demanding activity requiring planning, collaboration, risk calculation, and ethical consideration,” Paulsen observes. Some subjects turned shirking into a game they found more meaningful than their actual jobs.

Even when productivity is difficult to measure, presence is easily quantified. In order to get ahead, workers have to be seen to show up early and leave late. Many of Paulsen’s informants said they put a lot of effort into punctuality and attendance (as well as personal grooming), which made managers less likely to question their low performance.

Paulsen concludes that the most successful slackers have jobs with high “opacity,” which means that other people have a hard time grokking what they actually do or how long it’s supposed to take.

Uber-slackers are taking advantage of a feature of the modern economy: It is unusually conducive to empty labor. We are often told that people are working longer and harder than ever, and that may well be true, on average. But in many jobs, work has become decoupled from tangible production, making productivity difficult to measure.

A web developer told Paulsen that her team gave inflated time estimates for projects they didn’t want to do, and nobody could contradict them, because only the web team knew how long it should take to build a website. When a client wanted to put flying sanitary napkins on a company website, the team claimed it would take weeks, instead of the short time it would actually require.

On the question of why people spend so much time goofing off, Paulsen distills some common themes. Some said their jobs were so miserable, or so meaningless, that they felt compelled to goof off in order to endure them. Others said they wasted time at work to get back at an abusive boss, annoying coworkers or a firm that stole their wages.

Paulsen was surprised to discover how much empty labor was involuntary. Subjects often told him they were simply trying to occupy themselves because there wasn’t enough work for them to do, either because their workload waxed and waned or because their managers were too incompetent to make sure they had enough to do.

A few said they wasted time in order to rebel against the system generally.

“It’s like killing two birds with one stone,” a security officer told Paulsen, “You both avoid selling yourself entirely, and still get paid for watching movies.” The officer said slacking was his preferred method of “being a thorn in the side of capitalism.” Unlike union activities, which never seemed to him to produce results, slacking paid off right away.

Paulsen isn't the first to make the connection between slacking and resistance. The Industrial Workers of the World, which flourished in the early 20th century, endorsed various work-thwarting-tactics, ranging from “soldiering” (going through the motions, as slowly as possible) to shirking to sabotage. Unlike their sworn enemies at the American Federation of Labor, who championed the intrinsic dignity of labor and envisioned a future of well-paid jobs for all, the IWW Wobblies saw waged work as a coercive system that should be resisted overtly and covertly: If you couldn’t strike, you should shirk. In their view, shirking was a kind of redistribution of wealth because you got the same pay for less effort.

Paulsen raises an important question: If slacking is an effective form of resistance, why don’t employers do more to combat it? If the average worker really spends a quarter of her eight-hour day slacking off, that’s a huge inefficiency. Slacking is by definition covert, but management must also be somewhat complicit, turning a blind eye to infractions. The Internet is a major time-waster, and most employers say they monitor employees' web use. It seems like bosses could easily crack down harder, if they wanted to.

Some of Paulsen’s white-collar subjects told him that being allowed to slack off made them feel important. In this view, permitting some slacking can be a very cheap perk. Ignoring the occasional extended lunch hour is a bargain if it makes workers feel like valued professionals who are paid for their output rather than harried wage-earners who must account for every minute of their time. Who knows? Some employees might even be willing to compromise on salary or benefits in exchange for a “fun” or “laid back” workplace.

Perhaps this explains why Google and some other “new economy” companies have proudly institutionalized empty labor, with workplace amenities like video game consoles, nap pods and beer nights. Some of these are offered in the name of reducing stress or enhancing creativity. Cynics, however, say that corporate “cultures of fun” are really cultures of cut-rate bribery, where companies induce workers to put in more hours with cheap incentives, instead of paying them better wages.

Paulsen also suggests that the celebration of empty labor by tech companies is a form of corporate conspicuous consumption. He thinks Google is showing off what a rich company it is by flaunting the amount of paid idleness it supports.

Unlike Paulsen's subjects, the Wobblies weren't content to eke out an illicit nap here, or a few “unearned” dollars there. For the IWW, soldiering and shirking were means to a larger end. They saw soldiering and shirking as components of organized resistance within rapidly modernizing factories where workers' control over their output was being usurped by assembly-line production and “scientific management.” The Wobblies' ultimate goal was to unite all working people into One Big Union that would seize the means of production and abolish work for wages.

Paulsen's slackers have no such grand ambitions. Even the most politically minded see slacking as a way to extract as much as they can for themselves from the existing system. Empty labor can make stifling jobs feel more meaningful, but it's hard to see how this constitutes resistance, if it enables people to keep doing the same bad jobs.

Paulsen concludes that rampant slacking isn't hurting capitalism all that much. Nor is he convinced that slacking off at work is an effective form of psychological resistance, given that many subjects saw their idleness as involuntary or unenjoyable.

In the end, the most Paulsen can say about empty labor is that it underscores the absurdities of an economy where people are paid for their time rather than their output. Huge numbers of people are working significantly fewer hours than they're getting paid for, and the system grinds on just the same.

This is the shoddy reward that workers get for dramatically increased productivity: The work of an 8-hour day now fits comfortably into a 6-hour day. Corporate profits are skyrocketing, but the average worker is still obliged to sit around for 8 hours, on call for the boss. So, who's stealing time from whom?

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Lindsay Beyerstein is an award-winning investigative journalist and In These Times staff writer who writes the blog Duly Noted. Her stories have appeared in Newsweek, Salon, Slate, The Nation, Ms. Magazine, and other publications. Her photographs have been published in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times' City Room. She also blogs at The Hillman Blog (http://www.hillmanfoundation.org/hillmanblog), a publication of the Sidney Hillman Foundation, a non-profit that honors journalism in the public interest.

Being a gear machinist for years and year, I've never seen someone slack off except for some breathing time. Whereas the management practices lauding themselves for their successes that would almost never have happened without the workers making changes. Management with all of their tools have no idea what's happening, if things go bad it's the machinists fault, if things go good it the management. They live in a fantasy world.

Posted by Aneesia on 2015-01-13 08:33:38

I always laughed at the reports that execs were working 60 to 80 hours a week. Yes, they'd take phone calls at eleven at night or conduct business on the weekends. But seriously? The vast majority could always find long hours during the day to do practically nothing. Because their workflow didn't follow a 'normal' schedule meant that their downtime didn't either.

A closer study of executive workflow would be a bit more interesting to me than the average Joe or Jane shopping online while on the clock. I'd hypothesize that even though there could be stretches of long hours, the goof-off hours during the rest of the year would equal things out.

Posted by stuck411 on 2015-01-12 11:01:39

Work is still a clique-ridden counter-meritocracy. Why folks like the 'baggers wish to guard their privileged status, as they sink ever deeper into indentured servitude, busy Cc'ing all these K/ C Street conspiracy/ hate chain emails. The folks writing for lefty blogs have as much in common with workers as their 60's parents, before morphing into yuppies.

Posted by BeliTsari on 2015-01-10 14:58:22

And I would guess that so-called "slacking" is a passive rebellion against "slacker management" that costs jobs due to short-sighted goals and planning; and promoting toxic work cultures and depressing office environments.

Posted by Christopher Kelley on 2015-01-05 11:18:49

I like that slacking is framed as workplace resistance, and will check out Paulson's book. However, the verb "to grok" has no place in an article like this. C'mon, editors, know your audience; we're not all 20-something tech bloggers and this isn't Buzzfeed.

Posted by david m on 2015-01-05 10:24:42

So this is the world of work? In the schools where I've taught, the school district central command quashes the internet hijinks, students and staff alike (even a principal, good in pretty much every other way). Maybe I know too many teachers, blue collar workers, and retail wage-slaves, but I'm finding this "average worker" terminology hard to believe.

Posted by burnt out teacher on 2015-01-04 09:20:22

Such is the big brother syndrome on steroids. We need unions to put the brakes on some of this excess. Not that I support slacking, but monitoring the way it is done now borders and barbaric. You nearly need to be Superman to meet established production goals in many cases.

Posted by beechnut79 on 2015-01-03 15:08:36

My experience has not been this. The last corporate job I had Internet access for non-work purposes was confined to established break and lunch periods. But the idea of compressing an 8-hour day into 6 or a 40-hour week into 30 was the original prediction made for the advent of modern technology. Gosh, the futurists of the time really got this one wrong. In fact the term "electronic sweatshop" is now often the case, which could be a good reason why we need a revival of unionism--at least it would put the brakes on some of this. I am one who would be willing to compromise a bit in exchange for a more laid-back workplace. But then again I came of age at a time when such was commonplace, at least much more so than today. Everything changed when Reagan busted the unions, and we have not recovered from this even after more than three decades.

Posted by beechnut79 on 2015-01-03 15:06:58

This is aterrible article! It seems as though the author sees the whole world ofwork from her viewpoint, sitting on her comfy chair, behind a computerscreen. The world of work IS NOT like that for most workers. Efficiencyexperts are squeezing every drop of productivity out of the American workforce. The statistics of improving“production” (WITH stagnant wages) helps to prove the point. I would challenge the author to leave herdesk and visit a construction job or study workers in a busy big-boxstore. Those workers do not have herluxuries and most have bosses that monitor every minute of their output!

Posted by Allen Shur on 2015-01-03 14:50:37

Awesome article, awesome picture too.

God Bless Amerika!!!

Posted by ReallyReadyforHillary on 2015-01-02 15:42:33

I'm sorry but this is a really stupid article. Very few workers have the freedom to slack off for multiple hours of their workday; most workers are constrained by their bosses (and more specifically, by capital) and would be fired if they didn't work continuously for hours. The more time a worker is spending engaged in productive labor relative to another to produce the same commodity, the less profits that the Capitalist receives. "Slacking off" is only a privilege afforded to a very small section of the U.S. working class (i.e. the labor aristocracy). The slackers of the world don't need to unite; workers who do not have the privilege to slack must be the ones uniting.

Posted by Tascha Shahriari-Parsa on 2015-01-01 23:40:04

Ha, this is a fun article. I've been most of the type of slackers noted in my years in outside sales, inside sales, now last 20 years self employed in plumbing trade and still pretend to work most the day. You can get so much done at work if you don't work much. You can concentrate on being so damn good when you do work that the world is wowed. Nobody ever sees you fix the same thing twice. Self employed at way over the average rate so it makes work relaxing. Own the company so the boss is good about it. Winter hours now, that means while you might answer the phone 8-5, work is more like 10-2. Rest of time good for telling stories, reading stories & comparing tales. Oh, and i mentor young pups, get them to slow down and not make business plans that conflict with mans real calling, the afternoon naps and the morning walk.

Posted by Allister Uzzle on 2015-01-01 23:35:08

I'm retired now, but I never worked for a company where employees were able to slack off and still get the necessary work done. If anything, there weren't enough hours in the day. But, if the work of an 8-hour day now fits comfortably into a 6-hour day, I suggest employers reduce the work day to six hours and adjust compensation accordingly. Or perhaps they can reduce the size of their workforce and redistribute the work so that it fills an 8-hour day. Employers who allow unfettered access to the Internet during working hours are foolish.